Product Details

Overview

About the Book

The Bank Teller explores the desire within each of us to overcome our isolation and to see and be seen by the other in a relation of authentic connectedness. Peter Gabel asserts that this desire for “mutual recognition” is the very foundation of our social being, and is as fundamental in the spiritual realm as the need for food and shelter is in the material realm. He shows how the fear of humiliation blocks our capacity to become fully present to each other and leads us to collectively reproduce an alienated and artificial society that isolates us from one another and from the capacity to fully experience the natural world. In a series of strikingly original essays, Gabel shows how “the opening up of desire” requires a fundamental challenge to our existing social institutions and a new political strategy that invents new forms of work, friendship, and community.

About the Author

PETER GABEL is the associate editor of Tikkun magazine and former President of New College of California. He is part of a wider community of friends and coworkers who strive to remain true to the insights and ideals of the 1960s that first united them. Peter lives with his partner, Lisa Jaicks, and their son, Sam, in San Francisco.

Reviews:

From Publishers Weekly

These essays, most previously published in Tikkun, where the author is associate editor, exude the spirit of the '60s in their call for spiritual and political renewal based on the "politics of meaning." Gabel offers a vision of a communitarian, loving, transformed world. His vision entails a diagnosis of what ails usAa culturally produced "alienation of self from other" yielding "a crisis of meaninglessness"Aand a cure: the politics of meaning, a radical social effort to "transform the alienating public culture that envelops us" and to generate "reciprocal affirmation through meaningful public action" in a way that links spirituality and politics. The concepts sound fluffy in the abstract, and they don't entirely lose their fluff as Gabel applies them to such areas as philosophical foundations, American politics, public policy, education (he wants to abolish the SAT) and law. Yet Gabel is onto something. The title essay nicely challenges the notion that a "bank," for all its hierarchical trappings, is not a "group of people in a room," too terrified of humiliation to step out of their assigned roles, whether that of teller or customer. Clinton's election is convincingly depicted as the triumph of the reemergent "erotic power of the sixties," a decade Gabel extols, down to its rock lyrics (e.g., "All You Need Is Love") and urges us to learn from. This book is like a pie: a flaky crust, but a substantial interior.

From Rabbi Michael Lerner

Peter Gabel's powerful and profound analysis of the psychodynamics of contemporary Western societies is a major breakthrough in contemporary thought. Gabel demonstrates the way that we each participate in a fear-based withdrawal from each other into social roles that keep us trapped in isolation and loneliness while yearning for real contact and yet denying to ourselves and others that yearning for fear of being humiliated and rejected. Gabel shows that the desire to transcend these crippling dynamics is omni-present, and helps progressives and liberals understand how to address this need for authentic recognition, a need that till now has been largely ignored by the Left while it was being seized upon and manipulated by the Religious Right. This book and the thinking behind it has had a major influence on my own thinking, and I hope everyone who cares about saving America from its own self-destruction will carefully read The Bank Teller. --Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) and author of 11 books, most recently the national best-selller The Left Hand of God.

From Ralph Nader

Peter Gabel gets down to fundamentals about the politics of meaning. This is not a muckraking expose but rather a relentless push on readers to examine their isolation and alienation from one another, their neighborhood, workplace, and community without which a functioning democracy cannot evolve. --Ralph Nader's 2007 Top Ten Holiday Reading List for Activists